Before I start let me explain the issue. The client has an old Sharepoint farm that runs MS Project Server 2007. This server suddenly died after a corruption on their SAN disk. Luckily, they’ve backed-up the databases (MS Project databases and Sharepoint content databases). They’ve now prepared a new farm to restore the data into. MOSS is installed and the server has been configured with exact patch levels as the old/broken one.
When we first install MS Project Server, it creates 4 databases:
- ProjectServer_Draft
- ProjectServer_Archive
- ProjectServer_Published
- ProjectServer_Reporting
When we want to restore MS Project databases from another server, we can simply restore the backup on top of these newly-created ones. We did that for that client, the restore finished successfully and we thought, “WOOHOO”.
But guess what…when we visited the PWA site, it gave us “Access Denied” message although we’ve tried to login using farm admin/site collection admin account.
RESOLUTION
The resolution is actually to delete the PWA site and re-create it after the database restore. When we’re creating a new PWA site (through SSP link), we just specify the MS Project databases that we’ve restored the backup into. Once the new PWA site is created, it can be opened without problem and the data is all there.
Plus, the Sharepoint security for the PWA site was preserved from the old site that sat in the old broken farm.
Hope this helps,
Tommy